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David Hockney: I Am Not an iPad Artist

“I just happen to be an artist who uses the iPad, I’m not an iPad artist. It’s just a medium. But I am aware of the revolutionary aspects of it, and it’s implications.” In this interview artist David Hockney explains what a medium such as the iPad means to him. Read more …

David Hockney also talks about being a practical person, how painting is “an old man’s art” and about how you need three things to paint: The hand, the eye and the heart.The conversation also poses the question: What makes a landscape interesting? Hockney talks about his interest in spaces, colours and the subtle change of the seasons. He finds it interesting to revisit the same place as it changes through the seasons, which is very different depending on where in the world you are. As you move about the landscape of the painting, you will see how it slowly changes from winter to spring.

David Hockney (b.1937) is an English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer, who is considered among the most influential and versatile British artists of the 20th century. Hockney studied at the Royal College of Art where in 1960 he was featured in the exhibition ‘Young Contemporaries’ that announced the arrival of British Pop art. Though he was associated with the movement, his early works display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to some works by Francis Bacon. Hockney sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art, and began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, which later gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in 1960–61 on the theme of homosexual love. In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages, which he called “joiners,” first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially-processed color prints. Using Polaroid snaps or lab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. His work can be found in numerous collections worldwide, including National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Gallery in London, Museum of Modern Art And Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, De Young Museum in San Francisco and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Since the late 1960s, Hockney has had homes in both England and California.

David Hockney was interviewed by Anders Kold at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, 2011.